According to the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee, which has met 62 times on this issue, last month’s action is the “first ever mandatory greenhouse gas reduction regime for an international industry sector.”

Sustainability is becoming a widespread corporate mantra but choosing the right set of sustainability standards is getting complicated. There are a variety of options available for companies seeking internationally accepted responsibility codes and standards to guide their reporting and, well, to brag about in CSRs.

A new website launched this month by the United Nations, FastStartFinance.org, will track climate funding commitments from industrialized countries, essentially attempting to make sure that developed economies will deliver on their plans to provide seed funds that help poorer nations battle climate change.

The Copenhagen Accord included a commitment from developed countries’ to provide developing countries with “fast start” financing of about $30 billion over the 2010-2012 period, earmarked for enhanced action on mitigation, including Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), adaptation, technology development and transfer and capacity building.

The answer is in several parts: Yes it’s time for a binding and comprehensive international agreement on climate change; actually it’s way past time. Maybe there’s time to get it done before things become irreversible. Maybe it’s already too late. In any case the clock is ticking and that is where TckTckTck enters the picture.

TckTckTck is a recently formed umbrella group of individuals and organizations that’s pushing hard for results from what is likely to be a seminal event in achieving, at some point sooner rather than later in our lifetimes, a binding global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

It could be that it’s too soon or already too late to expect a anything binding on the world stage; the record of achievement is not exactly stellar as the Oil Age morphs in to the Age of Stupid. Maybe there too many naysayers and “yes, butters” poised for action out there; maybe there are too many well-heeled political and corporate special-interests hard at work to expect anything really meaningful to come from the United Nations Climate Change Conference that starts Dec. 7 in Copenhagen.

This is one meeting that can’t be allowed to come and go without a major effort to stem the climate change tide. The forces on the side of getting real and getting something real done have banded together under the TckTckTck banner.

The group officially kicked-off its 100 days countdown to Copenhagen campaign last weekend.

“The time is now,” says the diverse TckTckTck alliance of about 22 partners (along with nearly 1 million individuals) comprising faith groups, trade unions, environmental and humanitarian organizations, including Greenpeace, Oxfam, Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Amnesty International, Brazil’s Vitae Civilis, the International Institute for Environment and Development and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

TckTckTck Chair Kumi Naidoo says the campaign is an “unprecedented alliance…we believe that only by working together in a broad alliance will we have the size, power and influence to ensure a good deal in Copenhagen.”

The idea is to build momentum to achieve a comprehensive and binding climate change agreement in Copenhagen.

“Today, millions of people are already suffering because of climate change,” Annan, a campaign co-founder and President of the Global Humanitarian Forum, says. “Although developing countries did not cause the climate crisis, poor nations are suffering the most as unpredictable weather patterns and the increase in natural disasters affects access to food, water and shelter. We must end the deathly silence around this crisis because it is a major impediment for international action. Those helping raise awareness of the crisis through journalism should be praised for doing so, especially as December’s international climate talks in Copenhagen approach.”

A practice run will occur later this month during Climate Week in New York City, when the TckTckTck campaign will join the United Nations, the UN Foundation, the City of New York, The Climate Group and Carbon Disclosure Project in organizing Climate Week NYC, Sept 18-25. Climate Week NYC events “will demonstrate massive support for an ambitious, fair and binding international climate change treaty in Copenhagen in December,” says TckTckTck.

However Copenhagen ultimately unfolds the TckTckTck campaign could tip the balance to success. It’s more than worth the try. The impacts of climate change are mounting and the estimates of the economic costs of climate change are rapidly escalating.

Late last month scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that United Nations climate change negotiations are based on “substantial” underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to global warming.

The real costs of adaptation are likely to be two to three times greater than estimates for the year 2030 made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2007, say Professor Martin Parry and colleagues in a recent report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.